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Atlanta (May 17th): Need Ruby Advocate for Panel Discussion

Hi all Ruby Developers:

Do you know a business-savvy Ruby developer with the skill to give a great presentation in the Atlanta, Georgia USA area? If so, I'd really appreciate if you could either forward me their name and email and/or send me their name and forward to them a link to this post.

I run a business-focused web entrepreneur group based in Atlanta, Georgia USA that is having a meeting on May 17th about selecting the best technology for a web-based business. We plan to have someone representing PHP, Python, Ruby, Java, and .NET. Currently, I am still in need of someone to sit on the panel to represent Ruby.

What we are looking for is a business-focused Ruby advocate who has obvious experience with other solutions but that still chooses Ruby over the others, has the presentation skills to explain why, and the business savvy to gain respect from our entrepreneurial audience (i.e., someone who is pragmatic and shies away from language flame wars.) Ideally the person would be/have been involved with at least one successful website with significant traffic implemented in Java technology ideally for a smaller company (i.e. not a Home Depot, Coke, or Delta Airlines.)

In the first hour each language advocate will present a five minute slide about the PROs and CONs of using their language for building websites and where it is most and least applicable. They should mention the open source and/or inexpensive solutions that are available for the platform especially any tools as well as CMS and other apps. The second hour will be for audience Q&A.

The meeting will be held at the Ga Tech Advanced Technology Development Center at 5th and Spring at 6:45pm. We are a four month old organization that has over 200 members. Our last meeting on SEO had 70 attendees; we expect this topic will draw 40 to 50. In addition, it would be great help to have as many Ruby advocates in the audience as possible because we will be asking for shows of hands for who uses what technologies. Please RSVP if you are in Atlanta and would like to attend (RSVP is required.)

So if you know someone to recommend, I greatly appreciate it if you could let me know (sooner than later as time is running out.)